Jeremiah 32:1-15

In this week’s Hebrew Scriptures passage, the prophet Jeremiah takes a break from lament to make an investment. It’s about 587 BCE, and Nebuchadrezzer II, king of Babylon, is besieging the city of Jerusalem. For thirty-some chapters, Jeremiah has been predicting doom. The king of Judah finally takes this personally when Jeremiah says the king himself will be dragged off to Babylon as a captive. King Zedekiah jails Jeremiah for treason. As one commentator put it, “Real prophets often find themselves in some sort of confinement; false prophets on the other hand often drive Jaguars.”

So Jeremiah is imprisoned in the palace when the word of God comes to him, with instructions to redeem a piece of family property near his hometown of Anahoth. God says Jeremiah’s cousin Hanamel will show up to offer him this opportunity. When Hanamel does indeed appear with the sales proposal, the prophet decides he’s heard an authentic word from the Lord.

Jeremiah goes to great lengths to make sure the sale is legally executed, and then gives strict instructions to his scribe to put two copies of the deed – one sealed and one unsealed – in a clay jar – perhaps the ancient equivalent of a safety deposit box. All this must have mystified Hanamel and the palace guards. No real estate agent of any century would come within a ten-foot pole of this land transaction. The fair market value of a piece of property about to be invaded by Nebuchadrezzer is precisely zero, at least to a Judean. That’s probably why Hanamel is unloading it. He wants his assets to be liquid. He’s probably giggling all the way to the bank, or more likely, all the way out of town, out of harm’s way.

The last verse of this passage, verse 15, explains Jeremiah’s motive: “For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.” On the other side of doom, says God, there is hope. It’s the ultimate in insider trading: investment advice from God. Except that, unlike normal insider-trading situations, there are no facts on the ground to prove this is a good deal. Jeremiah acts on faith and lives in hope that God’s purposes will be worked out in the course of time, even if there is nothing pointing to that right now.

In January of 1943, three months before he was arrested and later killed by the Nazis, the Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote these words about Christian hope during dark times: “…There remains for us only the very narrow way, often extremely difficult to find, of living every day as if it were our last, and yet living in faith and responsibility as though there were to be a great future. It is not easy to be brave and keep that spirit alive, but it is imperative.”

Although Bonhoeffer speaks of hope, he doesn’t offer anything warm and fuzzy or especially reassuring about the immediate future. And as it turned out, he was talking about trusting a great future that he, personally, did not reach. It reminds me of Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Like Bonhoeffer, King knew that he wouldn’t see his dream of equality realized in his lifetime. It’s still not realized. And yet King and Bonhoeffer continued to move toward that dream. They continued to hope. When Dietrich Bonhoeffer was in prison, he wrote a letter to his fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer: “When Jeremiah said, in his people’s hour of direst need, that ‘houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land,’ it was a token of confidence in the future. Our marriage must be a ‘yes’ to God’s earth. It must strengthen our resolve to do and accomplish something on earth.”

Bonhoeffer was telling his fiancée they must live as though there’s hope, because our faith, ultimately, is that there is hope. We’re surrounded by bad news that could drive us to despair: climate disruption, government corruption, mass shootings, the immigrant crisis, white supremacy – we might be tempted to stick our heads in the sand and ignore the news because we feel so helpless. Or we might be tempted to live a kind of hurricane party existence. If you’ve never lived on the Gulf Coast, the object of a hurricane party is to consume large quantities of alcohol while a hurricane is coming on shore. It’s the ultimate expression of “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

There are many ways to numb ourselves from reality. But that’s not what God calls us to do. The people who have Jeremiah as their prophet, the people who have Jesus as their Savior, the people who have Bonhoeffer and King as their martyrs, the people who know that God is the source of their lives, these people do not despair. These people live lives of radical hope – not hope that’s a sentimental feeling, but hope that is a commitment to action; a hope that allows us to see the world differently and work to bring that hope-filled vision to life.

Charles Schwab used to say, “Own your tomorrow.” Followers of Jesus are the ones who insist that God owns tomorrow, and it is good. We are the ones called to live into hope by committing to action. To live into hope by acting for our planet. To live into hope by acting for our children, whether they’re struggling with school, or struggling with addiction. To live into hope by acting for relationships worth repairing. To live into hope by acting for our American democracy. To live into hope by acting for Martin Luther King’s dream of equality.

There’s an old Greek proverb that says that a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.